Bits and Bytes (1983)
-
We sometimes refer to "old" Windows as Windows/DOS to make it clear that it is not part of the same product family as Windows as you know it today, which is the Windows NT family (aka OS/2).
Tradition Windows wasn't an operating system, just a GUI layered on top of the real OS which was DOS. Specifically MS-DOS. MS-DOS being a clone of CP/M.
So until Windows 3.11, you had to install MS-DOS first, then Windows was an application that you installed on top. With Windows 95 and later (Windows 95 was the direct sequel to 3.11) they made the DOS installer install both DOS and Windows all at once so it didn't look like DOS was still underneath so much, but it was only the installer that changed.
So when people would run commands at the command line on Windows 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME, etc. you were literally just going down the DOS command shell underneath Windows and running the commands directly on the OS. THis is confusing because the command prompt in Windows NT like we have today looks just like this, but is totally unrelated and has no DOS whatsoever.
-
The last DOS family member still in production after MS-DOS, PC-DOS and DR-DOS all died off, is FreeDOS. FreeDOS is, as the name implies, totally free and is also open source. It is way more modern than DOS as anyone remembers it. DOS 6.22 around 1993 or 1994 was the last popular DOS other than FreeDOS which came about later.
You can download FreeDOS today and install it.
FreeDOS just celebrated 25 years. Unlike other DOS products, FreeDOS supports modern hardware. Any other DOS is really just a novelty. But FreeDOS is a modern, usable OS that supports modern hardware, while still being DOS compatible.
-
Episode 8 completed, just wondering if back in the 80's updated graphics cards existed to improve graphics.
-
@connorsoliver *episode 9
-
A little history... MS-DOS was Microsoft's iconic clone of CP/M. CP/M was the main operating system for Intel processor based machines before the PC (PC is a specific system design, Intel personal computers were around more than a decade before the first PC based on Intel came about.) DOS was the OS of choice for the standardized PC world. But for the non-standardized pre-PC business world that included things like Intel and Zilog processors, CP/M was king. One of the biggest CP/M machines was the Commodore 128!
Microsoft announced that DOS was dead in 1987. It took then fourteen years to actually phase it out, which is amazing considering it was first released in 1981, so that six years of momentum ended up carrying Microsoft forward and defining them for the next fourteen years at least and, in reality, tons of that 1981-1987 legacy is still making Microsoft do things today!
-
@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 8 completed, just wondering if back in the 80's updated graphics cards existed to improve graphics.
Not really, no. Someone had to have one, but it was for huge business and special cases. But it's not that they didn't exist entirely, it's that they approached them differently.
For example, they used video "chips" not cards, and people bought their computers around them. Commodore's first major video "card" was so important that their first personal computer was literally named after the video card that it included. The chip was called the VIC=20. So the Commodore VIC=20 was literally their old PET computer, with the VIC=20 video chip added to it in a new box. So even in the 1970s, people were so focused on the graphics capabilities that they were talking about and making decisions based on the graphics hardware that you could get.
The Commodore 64 got its name from the amount of memory that it included, rather than the graphics chip name from its predecessor. The C64 has the VIC=20 2 chip, though, so similar but upgraded from the older model.
The Commodore Amiga line famously always disclosed all of their chip sets and gave them infamous code names. With the Amiga time frame (late 80s) there started to be GPU options, but they were very different from today. But the basics were starting to emerge.
-
Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
-
@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
They mostly used MIDI sequencing to control synths, which were digital by then. Computers/processors could only really handle note data well, audio takes a lot of horsepower compared to MIDI.
-
@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
They did, I can't think of any though. But loads of pop bands especially did it. I was a musician a little in the 80s and there were whole publications dedicated to it then. And around 1986 I attended the COUGOR (COmmodore Users Group Of Rochester) meeting and the ACORN group (The Atari equivalent users group) sponsored an all-electronic artist to come and do a whole concert.
The Amiga and Atari ST were huge music production systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was in that period that loads and loads of studios starting using those tools all of the time.
-
@RojoLoco said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
They mostly used MIDI sequencing to control synths, which were digital by then. Computers/processors could only really handle note data well, audio takes a lot of horsepower compared to MIDI.
Which is why the Amiga and Atari ST specifically were used for more, they had extra hardware built in for that express purpose, and because they had that, people made peripherals for them as well.
But even there, MIDI was big. So you'd often use external tools like Korg keyboards, to be automated by the computer. They were basically special purpose audio computers at the time.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
The Amiga and Atari ST were huge music production systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was in that period that loads and loads of studios starting using those tools all of the time.
Those did multitrack audio or sequencing?
-
The Amiga and Atari ST were also huge leaps forward in performance. They were 16bit Motorola 68000 machines made well and were orders of magnitude more powerful than their 8088, Z80, Commodore, Apple, TRS-80 and other competitors at the time with their 8bit machines designed in the 1970s.
-
@RojoLoco said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
The Amiga and Atari ST were huge music production systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was in that period that loads and loads of studios starting using those tools all of the time.
Those did multitrack audio or sequencing?
Yes they did! They were really the first machines able to do that and affordable by humans rather than companies.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@RojoLoco said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
The Amiga and Atari ST were huge music production systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was in that period that loads and loads of studios starting using those tools all of the time.
Those did multitrack audio or sequencing?
Yes they did! They were really the first machines able to do that and affordable by humans rather than companies.
Crazy. I didn't have multitrack ability until Pentium II era.
-
The Amiga 2500 was really the leap. You could do that stuff with the 1000, 1500, and 2000 but it was super limited. The 2500 (right at the end of the 80s) was 200-400% more RAM, like 200%+ more CPU power, and newer support hardware than even the older Amigas and was so powerful that it was still blowing away most IBM PCs in the mid-1990s.
-
@RojoLoco said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@RojoLoco said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Just finished episode 10. I'm quite the classic rock fan. Does anyone know if any bands from the 80's used computer generated music?
The Amiga and Atari ST were huge music production systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was in that period that loads and loads of studios starting using those tools all of the time.
Those did multitrack audio or sequencing?
Yes they did! They were really the first machines able to do that and affordable by humans rather than companies.
Crazy. I didn't have multitrack ability until Pentium II era.
3D rendering via ray tracing, too!
-
The Amiga 1000 in 1983 was handling 4,096 colours and 640x480 displays, too! Which seems silly now, but displaying colours and doing 3D rendering was unheard of back then.
-
Episode 11 down, is there a reason that a lot of programs used green as a color for text and what not?
-
@connorsoliver said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Episode 11 down, is there a reason that a lot of programs used green as a color for text and what not?
Yes, in the OLD days, monitors only came in green, it was the only colour. It was "black and white" with the white being green. Green is for visibility, it's easy on the eyes and very clear. Some were made in amber or light blue, but almost all were green and were so common that they called them "green screens" (prior to the video term.)
Later when people had colour options, often green was (and is) still used for the same reason that they manufactured that way long ago... it's just easy to read. But others do it to be nostalgic.
-
@scottalanmiller said in Bits and Bytes (1983):
Later when people had colour options, often green was (and is) still used for the same reason that they manufactured that way long ago... it's just easy to read. But others do it to be nostalgic.
Kind of both reasons is why i set my terminal to this on my workstations.
